Irish star Bob Geldof believes that social media and the internet have made it impossible for an event like Live Aid to happen today.
The Boomtown Rats frontman said that the web has forced people into individualism, leading to us having ‘reduced ourselves’.
In 1985, Geldof was instrumental in creating Live Aid, which was an event that saw the world’s biggest musical stars put on a show to raise money for famine relief in Africa.
The event took place at London’s Wembley stadium and was televised around the world.
It was watched by nearly two billion people and raised $127 million for charity.
Twenty years later, the star organised the similar ‘Live 8’ event in 2005, which took place on several different continents.
However, Geldof thinks too much has changed for another event to be possible today.
He told CBC: “We had a huge lobby: 1.2 billion people, 95 per cent of the television sets on Earth watched that concert.
“Things do change, but that instrument of change is no longer plausible. Rock and roll was the central spine of our culture for 50 years. The web has broken down the world into individualism and that’s easy for authoritarians to use.
“A machine says if you like this, you like that, so you never move outside the ghetto of the self, the preference of your own, you never find a contrary opinion or something weird musically that you suddenly hear that you never knew expanded your brain and takes you off in whole direction.
“We’ve reduced ourselves. The 21st century is reductionist and it’s using the great tool of reductionism, the Internet, and we need to know how to use this thing, which is the most powerful tool ever invented.”
Written by Michael Kehoe @michaelcalling
